"You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.  From now on when people ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac."

Why recommend a book so many people have already heard of?  Two reasons: one, it's a book that deserved all of the glowing praise it received upon publication (which, in my opinion, is rarely warranted) and two, if people have read The Mermaid Chair they might be so disgusted with Kidd's faulty storytelling abilities they might not read anything else she's written.

The Secret Life of Bees is a unique coming-of-age story, set in 1964 in South Carolina against the backdrop of.the Civil Rights Movement. Motherless Lily Owens, whose abusive father made his daughter kneel bare-kneed on small piles of grits, runs away with Rosaleen (her black "stand-in mother") in search of the truth about her mother and herself.  In Tiburon, she is taken in by three bee-keeping sisters, May, June, and August, who teach her about love, the power of friendship, and her place in the world.

Philosophical tidbits had me placing Post-It Notes next to important ideas.  For example, in a discussion of the difficulty of choices, Lily asserts that the problem with people is that "They don't know what matters and what doesn't."  August replies, "The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it." 

So what matters?  Good books, of course!  So choose them!